Hollywood Doesn’t See Color, Especially Yellow

When I first heard that Disney was planning a live-action version of Mulan, my first reaction was, “They better cast an Asian person as Mulan.” I know it sounds ridiculous for me to say that because Mulan is fucking Chinese, but I wasn’t the only one as there was a petition to make sure Mulan was played by a Chinese actress, and it garnered nearly 105,000 signatures. It’s also not surprising I’d think that given the awful history of Hollywood in participating in yellowface, let’s say I wasn’t sanguine about this movie. At all. I mean, Katharine Hepburn as Jade in Dragon Seed. In fact, the whole main cast (except maybe one man) is not Asian, and it’s about the Second Sino-Japanese War! Andy Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is particularly dreadful. There are many examples of yellowface, and an Asian woman who runs the website home made mimi took it upon herself to recreate scenes from movies that have non-Asian actresses portraying Asian women. She includes a few recent examples, which I’ll get to in a minute. I loved the project, but it also filled me with sadness that it seems like we’re light years away from this actually happening, and it’s 2016!

Recently, there have been several anime that have been adapted into live-action movies. Most of them have non-Asian casts, including Airbender, Aeon Flux, and Akira, the last of which hasn’t been able to find itself out of production hell. Aeon Flux is one of the few anime that I really dug, and I was excited to learn that there was going to be a live-action version of it. Until it was revealed that Charlize Theron was going to be the titular character. Then, I lost complete interest and never saw the movie, not even on DVD. When I heard that the live-action version of Akira was going to be set in New York and feature white people, I was livid. Why the hell call it Akira if you’re going to cut the heart and soul out of it? It’s not Akira if it’s not set in Japan. This brings me to the movie that completely broke me–Ghost in the Shell. Deep sigh. GitS deals with the ramifications of a post-cybernetic world. It questions what it means to be human when you’re mostly robotic. And, it’s very Japanese at heart. So who gets cast as Major Motoko? Scarlett Johanssen. I can’t. Even, it’s what I can’t. To make matters worse, the director tried to defend it by saying he’s a huge anime fan and that it’s an international story. Steven Spielberg is producing the movie, and he said he’s a big GitS fan as well. He also said that a movie like this can’t be made if there isn’t a big name attached to the project, which made me scream in incoherent rage. He’s Steven fucking Spielberg. If his name isn’t big enough, who’s is? If it’s true that this is the reason Scarlett Johanssen was cast, then Hollywood is fucking broken.

In the meantime, Tilda Swinton was cast as the Ancient One in Doctor Strange. Benedict Cumberbatch was cast as Khan in one of the endless Star Trek movies.  Emma Stone was cast as a part-Asian woman in fucking Hawaii in Aloha, where the main conceit is that she doesn’t look Asian. Comedy is suppose to ensue. Outrage did instead. Asians are fucking fed up with this bullshit, even if no one else is. To be fair, I’ve seen non-Asian people put up a fuss over several of these decisions, especially the GitS one, which both surprised and heartened me. I’m used to Asian issues being ignored; we’re not called the invisible minority for nothing. The only minority who is more ignored than us are the Native Americans, but that’s another post for another day. In fact, I’ve hesitated in writing this post because I don’t see many non-Asian people talking about these issues except in response to when I talk about it, which I do fairly often on social media.

I’d like to interject that I have nothing against Scarlett Johanssen, Tilda Swinton, Benedict Cumberbatch, or Emma Stone. This is not an aspersion on them or their acting abilities. It’s that they shouldn’t have been cast in these roles. I normally don’t scold actors for the roles they’ve taken because they gotta eat and acting isn’t an easy job. However, these four actors have reached a level of fame in which they can be a bit more picky about their choices. In addition, listening to Johanssen talk about how diversity matters and Swinton defending her being in the movie is galling, along with the directors saying how we’ll all love the movies once they come out and how they’ve respected the source material. Spin, spin, spin, and I just want them to shut the fuck up. Nothing they say will make it better, and it’s simply rubbing salt into the wounds at this point.

Back to GitS. It became known that the team who’s doing this travesty made the actors look more Asian in post-production, including Scarlett Johanssen. In addition, they’ve changed her name to simply ‘The Major’. You have to picture me shaking my head as I’m typing because this just gets worse and worse as time goes on. I’m so fucking tired of Westerners who claim they love anime stripping the ethnicity out of it. You cannot love anime and not embrace the Japanese-y  aspect of it because you can’t have one without the other. If you can’t understand that, then you don’t truly love anime. You love what it represents to you, and fuck you if you think it’s OK to appropriate it. In addition, if i were a white person who liked anime, I would be insulted that Hollywood thinks I’m so delicate, I can’t cope with an actual Asian actor playing an Asian character. I mean, white people who like anime are almost uncomfortably obsessed with Japanese culture. I think they can handle seeing Japanese people in the live-action versions.

Then again, there are white people who are mad because Luke Cage is filled predominantly nonwhite people. I saw a snippet of a review that said it was racist, and the gist was because he couldn’t see himself in Luke Cage’s world. First of all, welcome to how many of us minorities feel all the fucking time. Secondly, wah, wah, wah. Thirdly, fuck you. No, I’m not being very mature about it, but I’m sick and tired of the littlest bit of diversity being treated as if it were the end of the world. 90+% of American movies have white people as stars and are filled with them. Maybe you can find it in the goodness of your heart to not be pissy babies about the other 10%?

It’s this same mentality that allows for the white guy saves the Asian people movies that have proliferated as well. Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai immediately springs to mind. Matt Damon in The Great Wall is another.  The latter is interesting because it’s being produced by the Chinese and the director is a famous Chinese director (Zhang Yimou) as well. Chinese people seem to be OK with Damon being the star, which brings up an interesting dichotomy that I’m not equipped to learnedly discuss, but I’d like to at least mention. The people who wrote the GitS manga are reportedly OK with Johanssen starring in the live-action movie as well. Here’s my theory. Western films are very desirable in Japan and China. They’re foreign and exotic and the gold standard. In addition, there are countless movies with Japanese people in Japan and movies with Chinese people in China. That’s the norm, and they’re certainly not lacking for representation.

Which leads me to a straw argument I hear from some white people when I get upset about this issue. Why don’t I get upset when traditionally white people roles are filled by nonwhite people? Take, for example, Spider-Man. There was a rumor that the next Spider-Man would be black, and my god, you would have thought people were suggesting the Antichrist for the role. The word ‘cannon’ was tossed around like it was going out of style. There have been several white versions of Spider-Man, so a nonwhite one would be a fresh approach. Same with James Bond or Wonder Woman or any of the gazillion other superheroes that are hot right now. If there had been five or six live-action versions of GitS with an Asian actress as Major Motoko already produced, then the current version wouldn’t be such a big deal. As it stands, however, this is all we’ll probably have for many years to come. It’s such an easy way to fill the Asian quota, and it’s starting to feel malicious that Hollywood is continuing to put white people in explicitly Asian roles.

I want to mention one more movie that pains me, despite it starring two Chinese men in two Chinese roles. It’s called Birth of the Dragon, and it’s a fictionalization of Bruce Lee’s (played by Philip Ng)  infamous fight with Wong Jack Man (played by Yu Xia). Philip Ng practices martial arts in real life, which is really nice as he’s playing one of the greats. This should be a home run, right? I mean, it’s all right there. Bruce Lee in an epic fight, oh, yeah. I’m so into this. Except, the main character is a white guy who’s studying with both of them and sets up the fight to impress the Chinese girl he’s lusting over–who happens to be involved with the triads. SERIOUSLY?!? That’s what you want to focus on? For fuck’s sake! Not to mention that the dialogue is painfully bad. Yes, I watched the trailer. Grimly. There better be some kick-ass (literally) fights in it for it to be at all redeemable. As it stands, I’m chalking it up to another missed opportunity. Hey, Hollywood. It’s OK to have a diverse cast without a white person being the lead, and it can even be a hit! See Hamilton for proof of this concept. You don’t need to have a white person be a stand-in for the audience. Trust me on this.

Oh! One more show I have to mention was one that NBC had picked up. It was slated as a family comedy, and it’s loosely based on a comedian’s real life. Apparently, after her mother died, her father asked his kids to pick a woman out of a magazine, and brought this woman from the Philippines to be his second wife. They didn’t get along, and he left his kids with her to go be with his secret family in the Philippines. I suggested that the title of the show should be, “Dad’s a Real Shit Bag”, but I was appalled that this idea made it past the brainstorming phase. Human trafficking is so funny! That’s family comedy for sure! When I read the description of the show, it said that it was more about the comedian being raised by her Filipina stepmother, which might have been an OK show (except it probably would have been steeped with tired cliches), but I couldn’t get past the terrible premise. Much to my surprise, after the outcry that followed the announcement, NBC announced they were cancelling it. Don’t fuck with us Asians. We’ve had enough, damn it!

Back to Mulan, which I mentioned at the beginning of this post. One of my tweeps (@dan_ps) told me that Disney is doing a worldwide search for a Chinese actress to play Mulan. It’s sad that my first feeling was of overwhelming relief and, yes, gratitude. I was fucking thankful for this sop, even though it should be the norm. It gives me hope, however, that this is how the tide turns–slowly, but surely.